Our Ladies, page 3
Father Ardlui opened the scraping, wobbling wall of red and yellow glass before him; he stooped, bended inwards to the humid well of courtyard among the yuccas, the florid poinsettia petals like distressed fingers – the hormone patches peeled or fallen, curled aside on the dry humus of the tubs. Sister Fagan, women! He shivered, lifting one shoulder straight and he began the massive fumigations of lighting his pipe – the Falcon he would hold upside down in his mouth to stop it filling with rain, whipping it in beneath his vestments just as he approached the gravesides and earliest arrivals of the family clusters … He pulled the door closed behind him.
Characterisation, the Catholic priest mouthed the word. He was writing a novel, was the Father, up in his house at St Orans, on the dining-room table below the hole in the ceiling where the scandalous chandelier had fallen down as the school bus passed. Many of his villagers took it as act of God on Father Ardlui for having such a sinful extravagance fitted; especially the old women who believed two black cats together were messengers from the devil. The Father had it fitted cause the light was good for the writing.
He wasn’t the only one writing a novel within two hundred miles; times were changing, and there was the possibility Niall Dubh, the poet, was sneakily making the biggest typing effort of his life over at Little Australia.
Father Ardlui felt he had almost perfected the grievous, seated stance worthy of a writer, the small Spanish cigar, emerging from the extreme edge of his mouth (left or right – he would roll it between), his seat pulled as close to the dining-room table as stomach would allow – transferring rough draftings of sentences from the left tablet of white paper sheets to the right one using the infinite supply of Sensor Technology pens; the grievous novelistic stance interrupted by the filling of the coffee mug from the large thermos Mrs Mac had left for him. After each five pages in clean handwriting, he would allow himself a pipe and grimace up at the hole. A good novel too, with a reductive style and dangerous vision.
The priest had an unknowing stir as he lifted his face and laughed, the word, Vision, and thick-scented tobacco smoke to the perspex circle two storeys up. The Sister had supervised the hoisting of the transparent ceiling, now besmattered with black and green seagull shit; the sky beyond momentarily blue between lumbering clouds (further through a mess of chicken wire to prevent nestings). It was badly needing cleaned by the janitor that, for surely it prevented light falling to the plants? The janitor here; just a boy. Once in the world all janitors were old. Now young.
Suddenly Father Ardlui says, In a village of La Mancha, whose name I prefer not to recall, there lived not long ago one of those … the priest spoke out, his voice like a stomach rumble, laced with sand, in English, The Sons of Something … Then continued, Those ‘hidalgos’ with lance in rack, ancient buckler, lean nag and fleet hound.
All this from old Father Ardlui in the well of the tiny courtyard, spoken in perfect Castilian Spanish as warily, Lord Bolivia eyed the staring priest and shuffled further along his perch.
Four them were locked inside one cubicle with window above. Orla stood on the pan in the next cubicle, her arms leaned on the top, holding a Benson & Hedges in her fingies that she was pretending to smoke, saying, … So the chandelier fell down when’we were going past in the Mud Bucket …
The other Sopranos laughed and a canopy of cigarette smoke arose. Orla assisted it out the window with an arm wave, … All the old dearies says it was act of God.
Fionnula’s black eyes in her white face looked up at Orla, two pure little globes of bulb-reflection in the blackness, Long ago that happen?
Och ages ago, says Orla, showing her braces.
It was a month back, goes Kylah.
Aye. Orla turned, Ages ago.
You’d think it’s the loco weed he smokes in his pipe.
The girls laughed.
What an old fucking … cunt the Condom was, eh?
Ya can see she’s gonna be right on our fucking tits all day. And that cheeky little besom Kay Clarke and Ana, did ya hear them, fucking laughing …
Talking of tits did you … , Fionnula podged a finger gently into Manda’s left, Bring yur wonderbra?
Course.
Intercourse!
Ooo, Eva Hercegovina, goes Chell.
Fionnula drawled, raised her eyebrows, Eva Herzigova. Hercegovina is where that killing went on …
It was in History …
Eva Herz-athingmy is married to Jon Bon Jovi’s drummer, goes Kylah.
Whats the point in that? Less you’re married to Jon Bon Jovi, what’s the big deal in being married to his drummer, eh? Fuck that.
Fionnula laughed and smiled up at Orla, who grinned back.
Ever thought? Chell goes, That Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, really look like Martin Sheen, their dad, but Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen don’t look anything like each other!? I really ponder that some nights, Chell nodded.
Once, Orla started excessively farting; all of one day then at night in the toilet closet of their summer caravan at Tralee Bay.
She was making more noise in that cubicle, the Old Man and Old Dear just outside … More trying to stifle her laughs than anything.
Back home she couldn’t get out of bed, just filling the big top of her duvet with the gas, then it stopped and she was scared.
She remembers nothing of the ambulance took her away from her bedroom, neighbours gathered watching and the night passage down through long concatenation of villages, south towards the Capital.
Now you know when you are really hungry, Orla?
Orla nodded. She was wearing daft pyjamas. Aye.
Specialist had big glasses and hairs grew out of his nose … not out of snotholes but nose itself.
Now you know when you are really hungry, Orla? Well, these cells in your blood are terribly hungry and they are such greedy guts they gobble up your healthy blood cells and that’s why you are feeling so poorly, feeling like bed all the time so, what Mr Sharma is going to do, every morning, is take you up here to radiotherapy. All right?
Uhhuh.
Now I’ll come with you tomorrow, but then Mr Sharma will have you taken up on your own, by one of the nurses, and what we’ll be doing, is buzzing you with our machine here so it cleans the bad blood that’s eating up your good stuff. He leaned forwarders and touched his pen (he never touched her once apart from on that day when they all knew nothing was working and she was jiggered), Now this will make you feel even poorlier than you do just now and you are going to think we are daft doing this but you remember how terrible those bad cells will feel because we are bashing them. He shook his clipboard. You be brave and see.
Uhhuh.
Orla had smiled, not even thinking, turned and smiled – not even afraid at that point, just thoughtless for a blessed moment of relief. She smiled at her Old Dear who, like having a sneezy fit, burst out, just bubbling and bubbling and no ways would’ve Orla too less bloody Old Dear hadn’t and gone to.
Your pubes fall out too! Leaned forward in Barrels Bar with a red baseball cap on, Orla had hushed even quieter to the leaned-forward Sopranos, All ma pubes in the gusset of ma panties; under oxters, legs, ah tell you girls it’s fucking brilliant, out the window with the Ladyshave and the fucking Immac Bikini Line when you’re getting bombarded by the radioactive waves! Orla roared, loud as she could an the Sopranos followed with screams that made the barman, Angie Badhainn, look cross the empty bar from his Free Press (Angie was fortyish and two of the Sopranos had mashed the face offof him in the Mantrap, on summer Saturdays). Each the girls now lifted their Hooch (all diff flavours, Fionnula on her usual Shott’s Vanilla seltzer, Orla: Appeltize). Chell kept going to the toilet and each time she came back her eye make-up was totally fucked. Fionnula swung an arm round her.
They tried to insist Orla didn’t pay for a round but she needed to so she felt alive, still one of them, no a dying virgin who’d lost two stone and still had to wear retainer braces cause no to wear them would mean there was no future.
It wasn’t cause politeness they didn’t want Orla to pay. It was cause they all knew the twenty she was paying with was the money she was saving for the maybe-Greece-or-Spain holiday all five them were going on.
Chell went off to the toilet fore Orla came back from the bar, slowly with a tray, that red baseball cap and the long earrings only highlighting there was no hair hung at the back there.
If Orla Johnstone hud had a wee brother he’d have looked like her that afternoon.
The holiday had been their chimera, already talked about in hushed tones on account the alcohol that was going to be guzzled, the suntans obtained, the boys ravished. Much of it was fed by mythic tales of Manda’s big sister Catriona on Lloret de Mar package holidays. The drinking so excessive she’d got seasick on the pedalos and vomited over the side, got car sick on the dodgems and vomited down on her high heels and the accelerator, the food so pungent she’d diarrhoea-ed back in the apartment and only had sanitary towels to wipe her ass with, so hot she’d take her bikini from the fridge in the self-catering and put bra and knickers in for the night.
Course Orla didn’t have a wee brother cause Orla’s Old Dear’d only Orla an lost a child when they still lived out the village.
Out the village. Above, moonhusk, hung like an abandoned wasp-comb.
Orla’s mother had woke in the railway cottages, bleeding from out between her legs. No one had telephone in the cottages in the sixties but it was going to be just as quick.
Mrs Johnstone dressed and put Alec’s mac over her, holding it onto her tumtum and walking funny to stop the little blood drips from touching the inside the coat as they sometimes fell, rather than running down her leg. She didn’t want to wear the coat and ruin it but Alec shouted at her.
She did slip into her best shoes since blood would wash off the leather and she insisted Alec clip the gold chain round her neck. That couldn’t get harmed in any way, I’m no going, turning up looking like a tinker, Alec!
They shuffled down the brae, neighbour’s curtains still closed. Past the phone box. Alec held her arm and pointed the Ever Ready bicycle torch – jittering yellowed beam making him all the more nervous of the time, though they hardly needed it with yon moon; it could dazzle you.
They waved down the nightshift bus collecting through the villages. On board, Mrs Johnstone insisted on them both struggling all the way to the back seat. Then she just had to have that cigarette to steady her nerves.
When she stood up at the Chest stop, there was a puddle blood on the old leather seat, Just as well I wore the dark skirt, Mrs Johnstone said, before apologising at length, to the driver.
In the Chest, once they got the skirt off and her up on the chair with her legs apart, the young nurse turned pale at what was down there. There were these little gutters sloped away from the chair so’s the blood trick-trickled away.
Hurried her to the theatre. When they removed what was down there, she was under local anaesthetic. Her short fingers felt up her big belly, she could only feel nothingness where all her awareness had been centred before – as if she ended there. It felt terrible queer. Then they removed, what was down there. They put it in a white plastic basin, the youngest nurse, used to general anaesthetic, no thinking, passed the basin across Orla’s mother’s recumbent body, the basin moved over her face and that circle of big powerful overhead lights revealed everything in the basin, so the mother saw the floating expression on her dead, infant daughter’s face.
She had been back, rested in her bed, crying for two days, when Orla’s mother began the bleeding again from between her legs – the doctor had not removed everything of the unborn child – pieces were still in her, going rotten. Again the ride on the night shift bus, the Chest stop … the chair.
What Orla hated most about therapy was that they wouldn’t let you walk. They put Orla flat on her back on a trolley from the first day and straight aways she sussed why. It was only going to get rougher here on in. Didn’t let her walk up to start with cause soon she’d be so fucking poisoned she wouldn’t be able to get to the lift up to radiotherapy.
When they moved her into the room on her own she knew what that meant too. Orla thought it should be the other way. Comfortable room when you had a chance. Into the ward when you were doomed.
Each time her parents came, the word hospice was mentioned by the specialist. Orla didn’t know what that meant then. That ‘spyce’ sound made her think it was just an only-child hospital, still with the idea of making you better.
When Sharma stopped the radiation, she started to feel stronger … and she knew how dangerous and what a cruel lie that was. She was strong enough to want to go back home from the Capital, back through the long orphanage of railway stations to the port, to the Sopranos.
Good thing about the six days in the private ward was, you could play walkman loud as you wanted; other good thing: the corridor was mixed, not like the women’s ward but there weren’t any bonks.
She saw a guy lift his pyjama top off, four rooms up, but he was ancient, at least thirty and dying too of course, difference being he’d had a life – all skinny.
Then they wheeled the guy in next door. You could hear his splurbles and rants all the time. He was Norway or Sweden or Finland or something – nobody seemed to know.
Orla wouldn’t use her toilet; she’d walk up the corridor to the big one with the hydraulic bath. She’d pass the room, see him lying there. Stop at his door on the way back. See his flat chest with its black hairs (his man-ness-that-wasn’t-Dadness), his chest lifting and falling, his mouth mumbling those words at the ceiling – talking quick, away right up, the morphine drips hung like wires between telegraph poles, into his arms.
He speaks in two voices that one. It’s frightening.
You mean two languages?
No. No, two voices. You listen. First he’s speaking in one voice then it changes, another – another person. I don’t know what languages he’s speaking or what he’s saying. No family ever visit, he’s alone, alone at the end, it’s terrible.
Orla says, He was a sailor. You can see the tattoos.
A sailor? Yes that would be his type. No possessions.
Do you understand what he’s dying of?
The cleaner looked, nervous at Orla who was on the bed with knees cuddled to her chin.
He’s dying of pancreas cancer. The cancer’s ate it all up so’s those dead strong digestive juices are running right into his stomach and they’re digesting it. He’s eating up his own stomach. Sometimes, way in the night when I’m lying here ah can hear it pop-popping; sure as fate, those digesting sounds all in the inside of him. Missus, you don’t need to know what words he’s speaking; ah know the things that are raving through his mind all through the night. He’s girning up at God saying, ‘Take me now, take me now out of this sheer, fucking agony.’
All that, Orla told them in Barrels, day before she went to Lourdes.
Manda was up getting crisps and shouting, Hello, Mountain Rescue, I’m in Barrels stuck at the bar and I’m needing a helicopter ta winch me back ta mah seat.
She’d also hit the wrong number on the juke box and grimly, Elizabeth My Dear on the first album was sounding in every nook and crannie.
In the bathroom, Fionnula had got Orla alone at last. Fionnula had noticed how dying folk are never left alone for a minute. For Saturday nights there was a speaker in there too, the song had almost finished and Fionnula never listened to any music anyway, she didn’t even own a tape recorder, she’d play Condom’s practice tapes on their living-room music centre.
I wouldn’t mind but, Orla giggled, I want everything to be as it was …
Don’t … shush.
Orla stepped towards her, stepped towards that voice she thought she could collapse into.
Fionnula took two full steps backwards till the top of her thighs at the rear came against the sink edge.
Orla had stopped coming forwards and was just forming an odd look when Fionnula stepped towards, wrapped her arms all round Orla’s shoulders and laid her cheek against the canvas of the red baseball cap. They separated. Orla wanted to tell what had happened, she rubbed tears away with her palms, her hands turned outwards as if her nail varnish was wet.
I’m going to pee, goes Fionnula.
See you then.
Aye. Orla?
What?
Orla, you know we’re coming to see you when you get back?
I’ll come and see yous.
Good. Good, Fionnula tried to add that they loved her, but Orla was already out of the door, using all the weight down her arm to shove the spring-lock outwards.
Fionnula slammed the cubicle shut, let the door swing back and touch her knee as she hovered, not sat on the pan… . She’d screwed one fist so’s her brilliant nails dug into the palm – half in response to the way Orla’d rubbed her eyes. Fionnula hissed, Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
The toilet door was the raised type, so there was space between the bottom of the door and the floor. In magic marker someone had drawn:
When the night sister was up with the Ancient One, Orla had stepped into the mumbling sailor’s room. She pushed the door back shut that the night sister kept like that to stop the sailor’s two voices from bothering her too much; distracting her from those pink-covered books, swooning chicks with huge tresses of auburn hair on. Orla’d lent her My Darling My Hamburger but’d heard nothing back.
Orla stood to the side of the door, listening to the gurgle of Number Two voice. His bedside reading lamp was at a queer, never-used angle, anyone compos mentis would never’ve had it at.
Orla’d stepped forwarders, looked down on his tattoos; they were the floor of a seen-from-above forest. His wrists were held back – kind of poofy like-style – but that wasn’t his fault. The silvery eyes looked straight up, the lips sort of chopped, he seemed to speak those foreigny things through teeth, the chalky dribbles dried down the sides of his mouth and round his neck, that cause he was dying, the nurses hadn’t shaved for three mornings.
Orla walked round the bed glancing back over her shoulder. When she cornered the bottom she kneeled, looked at the piss bag and saw the little clear bit coming from the water feed they gave him. She touched the bag, followed with fingers up the clear tube, stopping before it went under the blanket.
